Bookstore owner cancels bulk orders after discovering AI firm's destructive scanning
Wellington second-hand bookstore's mysterious orders
A Wellington second-hand bookstore owner, Anne-Marie Thorby, suspected foul play when a Canadian buyer began placing large, rapid orders for niche New Zealand books. After sleuthing, she discovered the buyer was likely an AI company using the books to train large language models, sometimes destroying them. Thorby cancelled the orders and urges other booksellers to refuse such sales.
It's so wrong. Our role is to keep books alive, to keep them in the world. We're book lovers. We want books for the good of humanity, not just to transfer knowledge for private profit, going into building LLM machines.
- lucfranken
It’s ugly. When there are still only some copies available of a certain book and they are all being sold the knowledge is gone. Let alone when it’s the only copy remaining.
That is of course not totally true, the copies are in private digital stores.
But for general public the knowledge is gone. Someone researching let’s say the history of a little village won’t be able to catch it.
This happens as well in current private collections. The physical book gets stored in a private book collection. But many also get out by the years when people are moving or die.
The amount of companies doing this is the real harm. There will be many companies running this process. It is absolutely not comparable to a single book collection getting burned in a house fire or being thrown away instead of donated to a second hand store.
It might feel for some as a not really big issue but actually it is in time.
- wincy
This mindset is so strange to me. Destroying books is anathema? These are niche subjects for books that may only have a few copies in the world. This knowledge should be digitized so it can be available and shared for thousands of years.
Better yet, why not raise prices by 10x for these online AI orders? Then again, I suppose you don’t really run a book shop in 2026 because you want to make money.
- Scoundreller
> A Canadian buyer was sending multiple book orders to Book Haven in Newtown, sometimes minutes apart, for niche texts on New Zealand specific subjects.
Canada is one of the few “western” countries without annoying customs duty/tariff requirements to ship to by post these days. US is a mess, and UK/Europe are going in the same direction.
- nullbio
If the bookstore owners were smart they'd be digitizing all their books and selling digital copies to AI companies.
- abeppu
All the offense is that books are being destroyed. They're being destroyed b/c that's slicing off the binding to get flat pages is most convenient way to scan them. But ... could AI firms sidestep all the vitriol by paying to rebind the guillotined pages? I have no experience with such things, but if they were willing get the machines to do paperback thermal bindings (even if they sliced open a hardcover) and then donate or resell the books back into the marketplace, a lot of the "destroying rare books" emotions
could be avoided.